When was the last time this summer we had something to complain about in Ottawa? It is far too quiet. The wife wants us to listen to the ads on television about Bell Canada being an unfair competitor. There is nothing new about that. The Liberal Party in Ottawa want us to rail against the F35 but that is already a dead issue. (Did you hear erstwhile young MP Chris Alexander back pedal like mad on the issue? He is going to ride that bicycle into a ditch.) What is being proved is the world will continue to revolve around the sun, with or without the Emperor running things from Ottawa.
Even our old friend Tom Clark abandoned Ottawa last week. He spent the week filling in on Global’s 6:30 pm national news. Tom is one of the best news readers in Canada and no doubt CTV got the point that they were really dumb to pick Lisa LaFlamme to replace Lloyd Robertson. Tom’s Sunday morning show on politics will be back in the fall (right after the Crystal Cathedral’s paid hour). That is a treat we look forward to each week. (Tom, not the Crystal Cathedral.) We will like it even more when Global Television gives Tom an entire hour and he can stop rushing his guests.
The media are so desperate for news out of Ottawa that we heard a news report about a Senator with dementia last week. After a very bad and tasteless joke about what is new about that in the Senate, we were shocked to learn that they were referring to Senator Joyce Fairbairn. Joyce was among about a half dozen senators who have earned our respect over the years. It has always been our contention that if we could just get rid of that useless institution, the few inmates who we could respect could still make an outstanding contribution to our country in some other capacity.
Speaking of respect, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is still going around making enemies for Canada. He tends to say things only after peeking around the corner to see what the Americans are saying. If he likes what they say, he repeats it for the Canadian news media. If the media already have good coverage in Washington, they know Baird is just mimicking what the Americans said. There was a minor exception the other day when Baird complained about the Russians. He told the news media that it is “not just the veto at the security council, but moral support and other support that has allowed this regime (Syria’s al-Assad regime) to soldier on.” Maybe it is just our outraged sense of proper word use, we would hardly refer to murdering your own people as “soldiering on.”
And then there is always our local embarrassment of an MP. He held his Hockey Night fund raiser the other week and then ran very expensive advertising congratulating himself for doing it. Now just what column in the financial report covers this self-congratulatory advertising? Oh, you mean nobody has asked him for an audit? Do you wonder why?
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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